Why KCS?

Table of contents

KCS breaks through the limitations of traditional knowledge management strategies and enables organizations to deliver greater value with more efficiency. The secret? Capitalizing on what they already have: knowledge. This increased value is created and managed by capturing the collective experience of the organization in solving problems and answering questions for customers. Making that knowledge reusable, and evolving it to reflect organizational-level knowledge, creates huge leverage.

There are three categories of benefits derived from KCS. They are realized at different points in time along the KCS journey.

1. Operational Efficiency

The first benefit realized is operational efficiency. Efficiency improves as knowledge workers learn to integrate the use of the knowledge base into their work. This means getting work done includes integrating the reuse of existing knowledge, improving existing knowledge, and capturing new knowledge if it doesn’t exist. The degree to which the organization can build both a knowledge-centered culture as well as an infrastructure that facilitates interaction and improves or captures knowledge from those interactions as a natural by-product of getting the work done will influence the degree to which the organization can maximize the benefits.

Improvements in operational efficiency show up as increased capacity and the ability to introduce both new people and new work into the organization with dramatically less effort and time. Integrating use of the knowledge base into the workflow enables people to benefit from the collective experience of the organization. This reduces rework and provides knowledge workers with the most complete and accurate information based on the collective experience of the organization. The collective experience will always be more accurate and complete than any individual’s knowledge.

2. Self-Service Success

KCS creates knowledge in the context of demand or use. As a result the knowledge is findable and usable by those who are looking for it. As the name implies, knowledge worker success and productivity is dependent on…. knowledge! Our goal is to provide knowledge that is known (captured and findable) to those who need it, at the moment of need. If we can capture and reuse our experiences, we can enable others to benefit from those experiences through self-service mechanisms. This greatly reduces the overhead of finding information by having to figure out who might know and how to get in touch with them. Effective self-service greatly expands access to what is known and allows knowledge workers to focus their energy on new challenges and opportunities.

3. Organizational Learning and Improvement

The final and perhaps most beneficial benefit we realize with KCS is the identification and prioritization of opportunities to improve our processes, policies, products, and services based on the captured experience. The patterns and trends that emerge from the reuse of knowledge allow us to conduct root cause assessment and take corrective action on the things that have the highest impact on our organizations’ effectiveness and more importantly improve the productivity and success of those we serve.

The aggregate impact of these three benefits results in reducing the ratio of our operating costs to revenue (or costs per individual being served) while at the same time improving the success and productivity of those being served.

As organizations embrace a knowledge-centered culture and become proficient at reusing, improving, and capturing knowledge, the organization begins to function more like a network than a hierarchy. It is a network of people and content (captured knowledge). The network connects people to content for known issues and people to people for new issues. A knowledge-enabled network, as an organizational structure, is way more agile and adaptive than the traditional rigid, siloed, hierarchical structures that are so pervasive in business today.

Member Experience

Consortium members who have implemented KCS in either their internal or external support organizations are reporting dramatic improvements in incident resolution and training times, in customer satisfaction, and in employee job satisfaction. As a result, they are realizing substantial savings in operating costs while seeing improvements in service levels.

They find they can:

Solve Cases and Incidents Faster

50 - 60% improved time to resolution

30 - 50% increase in first contact resolution

Optimize Use of Resources

70% improved time to proficiency

20 - 35% improved employee retention

20 - 40% improvement in employee satisfaction

Enable Web Success

Improve customer success and use of self-service

Up to 50% case deflection

Build Organizational Learning

Provide actionable information to product development about customer issues

10% issue reduction due to root cause removal

People choose to adopt KCS because they need to scale and extend their organization's capabilities in a world of limited staffing and budget resources.